Transhumanist politics

Transhumanist politics constitute a group of political ideologies that generally express the belief in improving human individuals through science and technology. Transhumanists claim that the transhumanist movement aims to improve humanity with technology and science (for example through life extension, moral enhancement and the abolition of suffering). American adjunct professor and author Jeanine Thweatt-Bates considers it impossible to define transhumanist politics as one set of beliefs, as the transhumanist movement includes opposite political perspectives on the central issue of regulating technology.James Hughes, American sociologist and bioethicist, has noted the dynamic between left-leaning and right-leaning visions for transhumanism and the future of technology and human enhancement.

The term "Transhumanism" with its present meaning was popularised by Julian Huxley's 1957 essay of that name.

Natasha Vita-More was elected as a Councilperson for the 28th Senatorial District of Los Angeles in 1992. She ran with the Green Party, but on a personal platform of "transhumanism". She quit after a year, saying her party was "too neurotically geared toward environmentalism".

James Hughes identifies the "neoliberal" Extropy Institute, founded by philosopher Max More and developed in the 1990s, as the first organized advocates for transhumanism. And he identifies the late-1990s formation of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA), a European organization which later was renamed to Humanity+ (H+), as partly a reaction to the free market perspective of the "Extropians". Per Hughes, "[t]he WTA included both social democrats and neoliberals around a liberal democratic definition of transhumanism, codified in the Transhumanist Declaration." Hughes has also detailed the political currents in transhumanism, particularly the shift around 2009 from socialist transhumanism to libertarian and anarcho-capitalist transhumanism. He claims that the Left was pushed out of the World Transhumanist Association Board of Directors, and that libertarians and Singularitarians have secured a hegemony in the transhumanism community with help from Peter Thiel, but Hughes remains optimistic about a techno-progressive future.

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